Month: June 2016

The Allfather attempted to jolt
the sensory mailbox of the Arctic Circle.
He thawed the bridle path
with a hot rinse of embryos.
He scraped a spark from his flint torc
so he could bake
his timeless suffer-pelts.
He shuttled in orcas
to fatten up his homemade ship burials,
constructing them in ALLCAPS
so they could rise and be sliced
into future Valentine candies.

Later, presenting to a school group,
a tour guide shook down one of the ship burials
for fertility symbols.

A student rolled his eyes, muttering,If I see another pomegranate in this gallery I’m gonna scream.

**

The Territory Speaks

I am this town
and its choir director.

I am a mellowed-out banshee of wonders;
I lend my digestive flume as a waterslide
for hard-candy toboggans,
topping it off with a doily half-pipe—

but my historian is a blinkered puppet.

He answers to a pink clown
who lives on a diet
of street corners and pepper spray.

They name my hoosegow “Sputnik.”
They educate school groups with a drone
that only talks in 140 characters or less.

They often reduce me to soaking their foam capsules—
they earn tax exemptions if they sprout into dinosaurs.

**

Big (Brother) Data

We attempt to pry the NSF-funded balloons
out from the centers of our hard candies,

so the government detains us
in their cream cheese fjord.

Just out of reach,
loaves of Big Daddy Data pile up.

They ask us who we bivouacked with last Arab Spring,
if they would find honeyed sickles on our pocket squares.

All I say is that I hope
they’re denied coffee boys in the afterlife—

they light us up
like twice-baked hot potatoes.

**

The New Fracking

They weave this town
to a loom sticky with zebra mussels.

Their centurions double as crossing guards,
some genuinely wanting to rocket-fuel our posterity.

For members of their two-bit parliament,
the coiffeur à la mode

is superposition, layers packed
with carbonated ram skulls.

My daughter runs off
with one of their androids.

We used to raise columbines.

**KATIE HIBNER is a confetti canon from Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, glitterMOB, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Powder Keg, smoking glue gun, and Word for/Word. Katie has read for Salamander and Sixth Finch and dedicates all of her poetry to her mother, Laurie.

All animals were exterminated from the streets of heaven
I’m just a single mom trying to get by

I earn 10G sweeping cum from the palace atrium
I squeeze my eyes into the coin-operated binoculars pointed at hell
The bored haggard sluts with their cold sores
Pimples in their hair like the inflamed eyes of newborn animals
Scabby legs slung over the chasm, tossing rocks from their aching hands, knuckle-bridled

Throwing rocks into the bottomless chasm separating hell and heaven is like hurting someone
and never having to take responsibility for your actions

I want the bored hell sluts
to find a secret tunnel
so we can rest our tired slutty thighs together on the steps stained by soul rain
which is like normal rain except a little warmer.

I want to wring the grease from their hair and brush it.
They would be better daughters
than the children at the foot of my bed
when I woke up in heaven

They lay on the floor, eyes open, waiting

I don’t know how long they waited
Their skin is smooth and poreless like a doll

Time cannot act on this room
And anyone could have woke in this room
And disappeared from this room
We are poured through the bed

Angels glide across the city of Heaven
we run to collect the guano

The scouring searchlight of an angel’s stupid lazy gaze
Can’t help but burn a thing that runs across their path

We respawn in a random location.
When everything looks the same
it is emotionally difficult to find our way back
to the tiny parts of this mega stone world
we call our nests

An angel’s huge, blind, axolotl cock slithers across the floor
I bathe it in salt water
tiny hands, or fronds, or antennae grope mindlessly along the side of the cock

The angel moans in the other room
I don’t think it’s a moan of anything in particular
it just makes those sounds
crawling toward nothing
lodestone in its pigeon head like shrapnel

My hands are dish-washing hands
red and scalded

The cock roamed from the distant chamber
and found me
10G

My purple mesh thong was smuggled from hell
in a picnic basket
and gives me perfect vision of sluts
so when my giant egg-shaped children have slowly turned their faces to the wall
the closest they’ll ever come to sleep
I droop my planemelting eyeballs through the thatch ceiling
of a hellslut’s house
and watch her stick her dick in [Red Potion]
tiny numbers crawling up her face like ants
+3
+4
+6
+7
my jelly hand crazy straws back to heaven
and crits my cock
hard enough to see the salt erosion on the inside of my own skull

practicing my special i was born
without a special. practicing my special
in the courtyard.

my children look older than i am.

the worst part of heaven is not having another world to dream of.

fantasize the perfect combo to tear a crack in the skybox.

practicing my special by the sole
functioning light in the 83rd stairwell,
the special that could be.

**PORPENTINE CHARITY HEARTSCAPE is a new media artist, writer, game designer, and trash woman, whose games and curation contributed to the contemporary hypertext renaissance and the popularity of accessible text art software Twine. She’s won the XYZZY and Indiecade awards, had her work displayed at EMP Museum and The Museum of the Moving Image, been profiled by The New York Times, commissioned by Vice, The New Inquiry, and Rhizome, and she is a 2016 Creative Capital Emerging Fields and 2016 Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Story Lab fellow.